Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time
“Give to everyone who asks of you….”
7th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year C
As I was pondering this Gospel, a thought came to me: “Boy! Am I glad that our Lord’s words in today’s Gospel are not the entrance requirements for the Kingdom!” If they were, I’d be in serious trouble! I mean, even some of the simpler precepts like, “Give to everyone who asks of you,” I have a hard time doing, not to mention some of the harder sayings, such as “ Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” Yet, the thought that came to me really is true. These are not the entrance requirements to the Kingdom. Our Lord, in today’s Gospel, is not saying to us: “Do these things, and then you can be my disciples. Do these things, and then I will love you.”
No, what He is saying to us, as He said to the crowds seated before Him, is: “If you are my disciple, when you know how much I love you, this is the kind of love you will be capable of. This is the type of love, a love divine, that will animate your life.” Do you see the difference? Our Lord is not saying to us, “Do all these things I say to on your own, by your own efforts, and then you will have proved yourself worthy of me.” Rather, He is saying to us: “This is what it means to live in my love. This is what it means to love as my Father has first loved you.” And that makes all the difference in the world.
But there are two things we must have before we can expect to love and to act as our Lord tells us to in today’s Gospel, and these are necessary if we are going to live in the Kingdom. 1) We must have knowledge of how much we are loved by God, and 2) we must know who this person is who is loved so much by God. 1) Knowledge of God’s love for us and 2) self-knowledge. These two things are crucial if the beauty of today’s Gospel is ever to become a reality in our lives.
This is what our Lord told our sister, St Catherine of Siena, as recorded in the Dialogues: "In the dignity of her existence she tastes the immeasurable goodness and uncreated love with which I created her." And St Catherine herself, in writing a letter to one of her spiritual disciples, wrote: ‘Build yourself a spiritual cell, which you can always take with you, and that is the cell of self-knowledge; you will find there also the knowledge of God's goodness to you. There are really two cells in one, and if you live in one you must also live in the other, otherwise the soul will either despair or be presumptuous; if you dwelt in self-knowledge alone you would despair; if you dwelt in knowledge of God alone you would be tempted to presumption. One must go with the other, and thus you will reach perfection.’
So, before we can love others, especially in the way the Lord commands us, first we must know, we must rest secure in the knowledge of how and how much God loves us. Let me be more specific: before I can love anyone or anything, I must know that I am loved. When I know that I am loved by God at all times, when I know that God approaches me, comes to me, looks upon me, only with love, then I have the freedom to love others in the same way. Now one might be thinking, “But does God love me at all times? What about sin? Doesn’t that make us unlovable?”
And yes, sin does make us unlovable, but not from God’s perspective, but from ours. There is nothing (and you will hear and have probably heard me preach this a thousand times) there is nothing we can do to get God to love us or to make Him stop loving us. He loves me, and you, and you, freely, completely. What sin does is cut us off from God’s love; it renders us incapable of receiving God’s love. And that’s the real tragedy of sin. The love is there. The love is always there, and we cut ourselves off from it.
And then, I said that we have to know who this person is who is loved so much by God; in other words, we must “dwell in the cell of self-knowledge”, as St Catherine put it. If God knows me and loves me so completely, then I must be worth knowing and loving. Now, in speaking about a true self-knowledge, I’m not speaking about some intense navel-gazing, of focusing on oneself. Not at all. But we can undertake the life-long journey of self-knowledge (a journey that is not always pleasant, especially when we have to take a look at things in us that stand between God’s love and ourselves), we can undertake the journey when we know that we are loved by God. And we know that the journey is ultimately worth the effort, because it increases our capacity to receive God’s love and our ability to pass it on to others.
God’s love is the light in which we stand and see ourselves as we really are, as He created us to be, and that light, that love can dispel every shadow, every dark corner of our lives. And when we stand, and walk, and live in the light of God’s love for us, when I know how much I am loved by God, then our Lord’s precepts in today’s Gospel don’t seem so high and hard, so out of my reach.
One thing we are often tempted to ask is, “How can I be expected to keep giving to others without expecting repayment, without getting anything in return for myself?” By giving to others only that which we have first received ourselves, by giving to them, not from our own meager resources, but from the inexhaustible treasure of God’s love for us. There is no end to what we can receive from God; you and I are designed by God with an infinite capacity for God. Therefore, there need not be any end to what we can pass on to others.
Fr. Brian Mulcahy, O.P.